Gardening as the daylength shortens

After a very cool Summer the temperature is dropping steadily.  We haven't yet had a frost but I suspect it is not that far away.  As a consequence we tidied up parts of our vegetable patch.  Here is the major result:

I do like the colours of rainbow chard!  If you expand the image note in particular the small cuboid vegetables in front of the corn cobs.  These are NOT capsicums but Habanero chilis: a 'Scotch Bonnet' style, reputed to be the hottest going.  (Since picking they have started to change colour, from green to yellow, as they dry.)

Hola amigo!!  On 16 April Frances was cooking up a vegie slice for tea, and we tried a teeny weeny bit of one of these Habaneros.  Holy napalm Batman - we both had to scull a couple of glasses of milk before we could breathe again.  The she put about 1/3rd of the smallest one into the slice, and it made it extremely tasty. Yep, they are HOT!  I saw some of these in the Fyshwick Markets, priced at $40 per kilo - I terms of therms per $ still good value!

In addition to the temperature another reason for getting stuck in was that some compost was needed to prepare beds for Winter planting and the compost bin was rather occupied by a feral Queensland Blue pumpkin.

 Underneath all the foliage were three nice ingredients for pumpkin soup!

There followed about an hour's work with fork and shovel extracting the good (s)oil from under the pumpkin and then turning the newest compost into the maturation bin.

The flower and foliage elements of the garden are still doing well.  The chrysanthemums have yet to burst forth but a rose provides a lovely burst of colour

as does our pin-oak.

Here is the whole tree!

A Pistachio has also got into the foliage situation.

I then moved away from such pleasures to do a bit of serious polllarding on a willow.  The final bit of effort for the day was visiting a neighbour who runs a riding school to remove a trailer load of equine by-product.  A Hahn Light was clearly indicated!

The final foliar photo is of a blueberry bush in the vegie garden.

A few days later we noticed how our chrysanthemums had started to flower profusely.  I have a soft spot for these plants as Dad used to grow them commercially for the cur flower trade in the UK.  Those were magnificent blooms perhaps 15cm across: unfortunately they seem impossible to acquire in Australia due to stupid State laws (sorry about the tautology) on quarantine.  This first image is some potted ones we acquired from Aldi and liberated into the sun-room bed.

This is a close up of our standard variety, which Frances has propogated from a couple of plants we acquired with the place.  We have planted them all through the garden.

Here are some basic 'sants, with some penstemons - which have been flowering for months - in the background.